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Online video is one of the biggest phenomena to hit the web in recent years. For every person who claims it’s the best thing since sliced bread you’ll come across someone else who believes it’s just a passing fad. The people who do believe it won’t have any validity are normally the same people who claimed email would never catch on and no one would want to use the mobile phone. Online video is not a passing trend it’s simply the internet evolving to the next step.

Although online video itself has been around a few years now, the process of actually optimizing it is still relatively new. It’s only been within the last year that Google have been making so much noise about making video sitemaps and YouTube has grown at a faster pace in the last six months than it’s ever done. Because of this constantly evolving landscape coupled with the fact video is one of the few aspects of your site that hasn’t been designed with the algorithm in mind, optimizing it can be very hit and miss.

As with any optimization one of the most important factors is still going to be your keyword research and this is still the best place to start. Like any online content your video will need a title which will normally be the same title as the page it sits on. If you sell curling tongs for hair, naming your video ‘about our product’ isn’t likely to win you any positions in the search engines. Titles like ‘how to use curling tongs’ or ‘top tips for curly hair’ would probably be more productive both for your site’s visitors and your chance of appearing in the results pages. You also want to make sure the file containing your video and any code underneath it also contains your chosen keywords. Remember when the search engine spiders crawl your site they can’t read the video; they can just read the code. Because the search engine spiders can only read text, a transcription of your video is a great way to not only legitimately bring your keywords to their attention but it will also be beneficial to your sites visitors too.

As I’ve mentioned the spiders that crawl your site can’t read video and if they can’t read it they won’t know to index it. You need to specifically tell the search engines your video is there. Google have been putting a lot of effort into indexing video content over the past few months and in the last couple of week’s they’ve made a renewed attempt to revamp their video sitemap process. A video site map can be submitted to Google in the same way you would a regular site map through your Webmaster Tools console. The parameters in a video site map will tell Google exactly what your video is called along with a brief description as well as other important factors like the length of the video, any ratings your video has and the number of times its been played among many others.

Once you’ve got your video sorted on your site and you’ve told the search engines it’s there you need to think about syndicating it round the web. Unsurprisingly there are hundreds of thousands of sites that will accept video content. Ranging from the generic to the industry specific with the most obvious being YouTube. YouTube is a search engine in its own right and is the second most popular search engine in the world and has over 80% of all online video views. The only difference is you have to take your content to YouTube, it won’t find you. Like any search engine it even has its own algorithm taking into account things like video title, description, tags, views, play list additions, shares comments etc.

The overriding principle of video is, in theory, the same as any other content online, produce good quality content and you’ll be rewarded. Informative, quality videos are more likely to get thumbs up and shares on YouTube and they’re more likely to acquire natural links for your site. Of course this may be a somewhat naive attitude so a little bit of good old fashion SEO would probably help too.

Do you have video content? What tips do you have for people wanting to optimize their online videos?

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